Johannes Vermeer

Johannes Vermeer (1632 to 1675) is nowadays one of the most famous 17th-century Dutch painters.

New online discovery tour: come along to explore his life and all his paintings with Stephen Fry and Joy Delima.

His status as an artist is on a par with other Dutch masters such as Rembrandt van Rijn and Frans Hals. Vermeer’s most famous paintings are The Milkmaid and Girl with a Pearl Earring.

VERMEER’S LIFE

Vermeer was in fact relatively unknown until the mid-19th century. The mystery surrounding his life and enduring anonymity about his work earned him the nickname ‘the Sphinx of Delft’. He was only ‘rediscovered’ in the 1870s. Vermeer did sell his paintings during his own lifetime, however. Pieter van Ruijven (1624–1674), the Delft-born son of a brewer, was a keen collector of the artist’s work. Van Ruijven owned no fewer than 20 Vermeers.

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Woman and children

Johannes Vermeer is justifiably known as the master painter of Delft, where he lived and worked his whole life. Born in 1632, his father was a silk worker. The artist married Catharina Bolnes (1631–1687), a Catholic, and they had 11 children together. The serenity of the scenes he painted surely contrasts starkly with the reality of his bursting household.

Apprentice and art dealer

Vermeer was possibly an apprentice of the artist Carel Fabritius (1622–1654), also of Delft and known for paintings such as The Goldfinch. Vermeer enrolled in the painters’ guild in 1653 and headed the organisation for several years. As well as being a painter, Vermeer was an art dealer who bought and sold paintings and probably served as an expert on Italian art. When Vermeer died, he was buried in Delft.

WHAT ARE THE DISTINCTIVE QUALITIES OF VERMEER’S WORK?

Johannes Vermeer’s early painting style

Vermeer’s early historical paintings reflect the influence the Utrecht Caravaggisti, a group of artists who were themselves influenced by the Italian painter Caravaggio, portraying their physically powerful human subjects in close-up, using powerful contrast of light and dark, in historical contexts and scenes. In early paintings such as Diana and Her Nymphs, Vermeer brings biblical and mythological scenes to life in an almost theatrical manner.

Johannes Vermeer’s late painting style

Vermeer is now best known for his intimate genre paintings portraying a main subject focusing on some everyday activity, and nearly always positioned near a window letting in daylight. Nearly all his subjects were women. Scenes from daily life in his home city of Delft became his specialism, through which he was able to demonstrate an ability to grab and hold the viewer’s attention with depictions such as that of a row of houses that many would have walked past without a second glance, or of someone performing a domestic task, or reading a letter. He affords us a glimpse into the reality of what was, in his time, a new middle-class domain.

His human subjects appear completely absorbed by what they are doing, as if deep in thought. We glimpse in the paintings just a single captured moment, all motion frozen as if in a photograph. By making scenes such as these the subject of his paintings, Vermeer succeeded in making the ordinary extraordinary again. What words did the correspondence being read by the Woman Reading a Letter contain? Had it been sent by a lover?

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Masterful technique

Vermeer could capture light on objects like no other artist – and this ability has made his name famous all over the world. The fabrics in his paintings shimmer, and the shadows on the wall are as real as can be. In Woman Reading a Letter the light falls on the letter itself, immediately drawing in the viewer’s eye – Vermeer uses light to guide our gaze.

In several paintings, including The Milkmaid, Girl Reading a Letter at open window and The Little Street, Vermeer used a pointillist technique, painting dozens of white and brightly coloured dots on objects such as a piece of bread or a floor rug to replicate in refined detail the scattering of daylight.

Vermeer was also a master in the creation of depth in his paintings, for example by only lightly defining contours. He also plays with partially obscured vistas – into a hallway or through an open curtain – to reinforce the illusion of three-dimensional space while intensifying the curiosity of the viewer, prompting us to wonder: What is happening there, just out of sight?

Details of Vermeer

Ingenious composition

Vermeer composed his scenes as if he were building a theatre set in which to place his subject, meticulously positioning elements such as items of furniture, kitchen utensils, food, and human figures – each object and person in these sophisticated compositions is assigned its own important role.

Vermeer manages in this way to captivate our attention – this is as true for people who have often studied his paintings as for those who see them for the first time. Details such as tiles in a corner, or a nail in a white wall, will sometimes only ‘appear’ belatedly. Vermeer’s shadows, as well as his light, are deserving of our attention. In The Milkmaid he impresses us with effects such as the blurred contours of folds in a skirt, and the time-worn walls.

Johannes Vermeer would continually adapt and update his compositions. X-rays have revealed objects hidden by thick layers of paint that would have originally been part of the composition, such as a washing basket in The Milkmaid where a foot stove now stands. This endeavour to achieve perfection is a defining characteristic of the artist.

A wealth of colour

Though he was not a wealthy man, Vermeer would not scrimp when it came to painting materials. He used a pigment made from ground lapis lazuli – a very costly semiprecious stone that in the 17th century had to be shipped from Afghanistan to the Netherlands – to make his own blue paint, for example. The vivid colours still shimmer vibrantly as we look at them today, hundreds of years after he painted them.

Vermeer would have colours ‘echo’ through a painting, to create a harmonious sense of unity. See, for example, the blue of the clothing worn by the Woman Reading a Letter reappearing in the chairs, the bulb-shaped weight beneath under the map on the wall, and even in the areas of shadow.

There were no tubes of paint available in Vermeer’s time, and he had to mix oil, a binding agent and finely ground pigments to make his own.

An oeuvre of modest size

For a long time, the relatively small number of works now known to have been painted by Vermeer were attributed to other artists. And forgeries have been made of Vermeer’s canvasses on multiple occasions. One of the forgers was the Dutch painter Han van Meegeren, who went further than merely drawing inspiration from the Woman Reading a Letter: he copied the painting in all its details. The result of his work closely resembles the original. Can you identify the differences?

Some 35 paintings have been officially recognised as genuine Vermeers. Here you will find a list of all paintings by Vermeer. Early on in his career, he painted large-scale works, but with the passing of time he transitioned to the smaller canvasses that have come to define his oeuvre. The Milkmaid, for example, measures just 41 by 45 centimetres – not much larger than a sheet of A4 paper.

Vermeer would expertly build up his paintings with layer upon layer of oils. The modest extent of his oeuvre is a reflection of the time and state of calm that he needed to execute each painting.

VERMEER AT THE RIJKSMUSEUM

The Rijksmuseum collection contains four Vermeer paintings: three domestic scenes and one city scene, his world-famous The Little Street.

The best-known painting in the collection is The Milkmaid. At first sight it appears to depict the quite ordinary scene of a humble kitchen maid at work, but take your time and you will see that first appearances can deceive – after all, how often is it that you get such a glimpse into the inner sanctum of the household?

Though similar in theme, Woman Reading a Letter and The Love Letter present their subject in very different ways. In the first painting it is as if we were spying on a woman calmly reading a letter in the morning light. As viewers we are left completely in the dark about the content of the letter, however, and all we can do is base our speculations on her facial expression. What a difference from the second painting, showing a domestic scene in which the smile of the housemaid and the expectant expression on the face of the recipient tell us a clear story.

Vermeer immortalised a real corner of Delft in The Little Street, which depicts the home of his aunt. Did you know that The Little Street was in reality not a regular street at all, but a canal? Vermeer omitted the water, by ‘cropping’ his composition, just as a photographer might do today.